It has grown into a near real-time messaging service ranging from the banal “just ate an egg McMuffin” to the useful, “Arrested” which freed James Karl Buck from an Egyptian jail cell. [See link at end of blog post]

Here are five things a business person needs to know about Twitter:

1. SEARCH - You can search Twitter for keywords related to your company or product. For example, if you were Dell Computer, you’d like to know about a groundswell of disatisfaction before it hits critical mass. [Example: searching for Dell + Laptop + Problem]
2. FOLLOW - You can “follow” individual Twitterers by clicking on their profile and then “Follow.”  Savvy geeks will also click on the RSS feed icon and add them to their newsreader.  Useful if someone is promoting or slamming your business.  Or if you just find something funny or interesting.
3. PROMOTE - you can promote your product, business, idea or meme by “tweeting” regularly.  But if you choose to do so, you are well advised to keep it interesting for the reader by offering something of interest and value.  For example: Twitter-only discounts.
4. RECRUIT - Peter Shankman of “Help a Reporter Out” uses Twitter to send out urgent requests matching reporters to qualified sources: National AM Show needs “perfectionist mom who is driving yr family crazy” [Click to subscribe to all "urgent help a reporter out" requests]
5. UNRELIABLE - Twitter.com has grown beyond what its infrastructure can support.  It’s also a free service and therefore goes up and down with such frustrating frequency there are actual websites like “Is Twitter Down?“.  This is not to be confused with “Is It Down Or Is It Just Me” which is useful in figuring out if the gods of technology are picking on just you or everyone.

Lastly, a word about privacy.  Once you tweet it’s out there forever.  You are a part of the public timeline.  So think twice about that New Year’s Eve party twitter.  Yes, you can protect your feed and only allow approved members to follow you.  But what’s the point?  If you’ve got something to say then say it loudly.

Link : Twitter Sign Up Page

Link : CNN Story Student ‘Twitters’ his way out of Egyptian jail

Link : Subscribe to Mark’s Twitter feed (mostly banal)

Last night I saw  Michael Weller’s BEAST, produced by New York Theater Workshop - the folks who brought you “RENT.” It’s told as a “fever in six acts” and arcs from Iraq to Germany to Crawford, Texas.  From a creative perspective it leaves you warm; from a budget perspective it gets you hot under the collar.

Set on a minimalist stage the props consist of a coffin draped in the American flag and a simple aluminum chair.  It forces your attention on the actors: the heavy lifting is to be done by their words you think to yourself. But then we get to “the big scene” set against the backdrop of Mr. Rushmore.

The set is gorgeous, perfectly lit and highly dimensional. “Hmm I think, that’s a lot of money right there.  Wonder why?” Because it turns out the mountains talk.  Or more accurately, their mouth’s move like the masks from “Planet of The Apes” which is to say not very well.  The audience groans.   And all I can think of is what an old timer from Hollywood told me once: “don’t blow your wad on one shot.”

I can imagine how this idea might was sold internally: from inspiration to group-think to mass hypnosis.  But the fact of the matter is a set piece this high tech is out of place against the perfectly executed minimalist sets from the other five acts.   The same concept of talking presidents could have been communicated with a mural and sound design for 1/10th the price.

When you’re budgeting for almost anything creative you’ve got to avoid feature-creep and self-indulgence.  It takes self-discipline and a willingness to focus on results over form.  New York Theater Workshop does in fact have a new Managing Director William Russo with just that mandate. No doubt he’s going to balance business with creativity, risk to reward.

But it’s too late for “BEAST” which closes this week.  Seats have not been filled to capacity and the reviews have been tepid.  Lessons learned:

1. Don’t mix minimalism with over-the-top techno wizardy
2. Match form to function
3. Don’t include talking presidents in your next corporate presentation

I’m going to ask for some free advice (beers on me for this one). Colleagues and friends (including yourself) have invited me to join them on linked-in, facebook, etc…

As an avowed Luddite and someone who a) does not feel I have the time to maintain relationships on these sites and b) simply does not trust the security and intent of these sites; please explain to me why using these or similar services is good for my career or otherwise.

I do not want to avoid these sites if there is a real benefit to my career, but I have always had a fairly high bar for what is a real enhancement, and what just adds more maintenance.

Please also explain how the etiquette of not accepting someone’s invitation works. I do not want to offend colleagues by ignoring their invite. If I do sign up, there may be people for whom I would not write any kind of endorsement (also a high bar for me) also an etiquette dilemma.

When Did Noah Build The Ark?

Answer?  BEFORE the Flood. You build your network before you need it. And that takes time.  How much time? Well I joined Linked-In back in 2003 when the company first started.  It seemed like a good way of keeping in touch with far-flung friends. I haven’t put much effort into it, maybe an hour a month and I’ve got about 225 connections.

Ditto for Plaxo . I use the service to sync my address books between multiple PC’s and Macs, and see who’s up to what.  Since the company was bought by Comcast Cable - known for their customer service and high privacy standards - I’ve backed off a bit. Maybe 20 minutes a month.

Facebook was a bitch of a stretch - “Isn’t that just for College kids?” - but I’ve found I rather like it. While I have in fact reconnected with high school friends and college sweethearts, most of my Facebook friends are people I would hang out with on a regular basis. Especially if they were buying the beer.  Time investment: 30 minutes a month.  Frequency that I check it: much higher, especially with the new iPhone app.

You Talking to Me?

There are in fact some people you just don’t want to talk to.  I’m no Roy Rogers (”I never met a man I didn’t like”) but I’m close enough.  So I tend to accept most invitations except from complete strangers who have not been introduced through a mutual friend (which Linked In handles for you).  And in the awkward instance where someone sends you an invitation to “be a friend” and you’re thinking “Oh no you didn’t just do that did you?” there’s only one thing to do.  Ignore it.  It feels rude by my “Southern Gentlemen” standards but this ain’t the South, it’s digital.

This also applies to you not seeking an online “friendship” with your kid’s profile on Facebook and your direct reports on other social services.  Etiquette demands that you give them space and not put them in an awkward position in the first place.

Liquor?  I Hardly Know Her!

Endorsements are a tough one.  I’m rather picky and I’ve never understood their role on these sites.  But some people volunteer them and others ask you to write them. My policy is if they were genuinely helpful and talented it is my pleasure.  I endorsed my mortgage broker on Linked In.  Someone I haven’t worked with in a decade.

Why?  Because she helped me arrange financing for my first house with an elegant and complicated package of a first and second trust. Several years later she helped me refinance again below market rate.  And she took care of my local clients’ needs giving them personal service.  Would I endorse the guy who prints Group 8020’s corporate schwag?  Probably not.

Privacy and The Bottom Line

I would encourage you to sign up for two services, probably Linked In and Facebook.  Next, I would strongly encourage you to go to Account Settings and navigate to the Privacy Settings.  Some default to settings that are too open for my liking.  For example, on Linked In I don’t share my information with their “affiliated sites including New York Times” but I do allow people to browse my network.  Why? I don’t want spam from the NY Times but I do want to send new business to members of my network.  Just tweak as you go along.

In the end it’s like Chance Gardener said in the movie “Being There“:  “This is just like television, only you can see much further.”

Proprioception is the sense of where your own limbs are in space relative to the rest of the body. And it has significance for your business as well as your body.

It’s the sense that allows you to touch your nose with your eyes closed or, if you’ve been drinking, fail the sobriety test. It’s why when you wake up in the morning you don’t scream “Oh my God they’ve stolen my legs!” simply because you can’t see them under the covers.

Scientists will tell you that this ability is not reliant upon one organ but rather the sum total of the entire nervous system, constantly taking in new information and synthesizing spatial location. Working with clients on 100 Day Plans we often find an initial distortion of business or project proprioception.  For example:

• “We have to do something right away or the sky will fall.”
• “We don’t have enough options and what we do have to chose from is terrible.”
• “What we want to do can never be done. The objective is too great.”

With probing we discover that there is often more time than perceived, more options than initially identified and goals more attainable than originally conceived.  So what’s the deal?  Use all the information you can get and synthesize.  Is your business unit in danger of imminent failure? Are you sure? What are you basing this on?

I am not being naive here.  Fear short circuits the nervous system and distorts both logic and common sense. My business unit - Group 8020 - is not going to fail.  We are not a luxury item. We are a must have during recessions.  Looking at your own business ask yourself similar questions about your own value proposition.

So with all due respect I ask the fear-mongers “down the hall”  a simple question: Can you walk in the dark from your bed to your bathroom in the middle of the night without killing yourself?  How is this possible?  So how sure are you that business is going to fail? That you’re going to lose your customers?

Use all your senses and synthesize.  And turn the volume down on the TV it’s just going to make you crazy.

What do you do when you have too many choices and not enough time? How do you make sense of a lot of raw information about a problem that has no apparent pattern? And most important, how do you do it fast?

The 69 cents solution:

The fastest way I know how - and one that I use with most clients - is the decidedly low tech use of 5×7 index cards.  These are the cards you can buy for 69 cents at the grocery store or local office supplies outlet.  The entire process takes 30 minutes and here’s how it works.

Do a data dump. Get it out of your head.

1. Take a magic marker and write in bold letters on the front of the card one “idea” or “problem” or “factoid”
2. Fill out as many cards as possible in 10 minutes time.  Don’t worry if you repeat yourself. Don’t worry if the words you choose sound awkward or less than perfect.  It’s about speed not accuracy.
3. When you have about 50 cards or the 10 minutes is up stop work. Take a deep breath.  You’ve done well.  You’ve emptied your mind for the time being.
4. Sort through the cards and try to put them in stacks according to any theme or commonality you may notice.  Label the stacks with title cards. For example you might have a stack called “ideas” another named “problems” and a third called “people who can help me.” If you have cards that don’t seem to fit anywhere, just put them in a temporary group called “other.”
5. Now walk away and take a short break. Coffee, tea, breath of fresh air, all that matters is putting distance between you and those stacks.
6. Now sort the cards and stacks one more time.  Did your short coffee break give you time to see new patterns?  Did you think of details you want to add?  If so, flip the card over and in pen or pencil write a few sentences about it on the back.
7. Make a list of the title cards.  This list is the skeleton of the solution for the problem you are trying to resolve.  And you’ve identified it in a half hour.

The power of the shuffle:

In the coming days you will shuffle and reshuffle, add, combine and delete cards. It’s your right to change your mind as often as you see fit. But each time you do, you’ll find yourself closer to an answer that makes personal sense.  Why?  Because there is power in tangibility.  You are holding the solution in your hands.  And unlike computer software which enforces a rigid, linear thinking process, your index cards ecourage playing “what if” cominbation games.

It’s worked for others. It will work for you.

Clients who have benefited from this technique include:

• Marketing Managers
• Advertising Execs
• Researchers
• Writers
• Startups

Give it a try.  Sometimes low tech solutions provide insight into high tech problems.  And best of all, you’ll never have to plug your cards into an electrical outlet or worry about getting a WI-FI connection for your magic marker.

Have suggestions or enhancements to the process? Please leave a comment below!

• Asynchronous communications with the web server
• Javascript
• XML

What Do These Buzzwords Mean?

Asynchronous refers to the method in which the web browser communicates with the server.  Rather than rely upon the actions of the user - “click,” then send data to server, then wait for the server to send a response back, then refresh the screen - the AJAX “engine” manages the process in the background.  You can think of it as a geeky conductor orchestrating the multiple technical instruments of web applications.

Javascript - not to be confused with “Java” - is the scripting language which manages browser-side activities. It allows for the embedding of objects like Google Maps and YouTube videos, validates fields to ensure that you actually entered what was needed by the application, and increase the functionality of elements on the web page.  [And yes, it is also responsible for those evil pop-up windows we all hate]

XML (eXtended Markup Language) refers to a set of open standards principally for data management on the internet.  It is considered “extensible” because it allows developers to establish and define their own elements; for example “this piece of data is an address” or “this data is geocoding” which is in part how Google Maps can look up an address and display it on a map.

Sites You Like Already Use AJAX

The sites you use daily already use AJAX.  For example,

• Google Maps - loading and updating maps in the background while you search for locales of interest
• Yahoo’s Flickr - the photo sharing application
• Netflix - AJAX makes it possible for you to reorder you rental queue by dragging and dropping
• 37 Signal’s “Basecamp” project management app (which we recommend highly)

Why You Might Want It If You’re Tasked With Building A Site

If you run an I.T. project charged with invigorating a customer-facing web portal, someone will at some point say “hey, why don’t we use AJAX and make this thing sexy?”  It’s a great question.  Maybe you should. But remember that this technology can be expensive and add time to the development cycle. The art of looking “easy” doesn’t always come cheap.

Buzzword Status Score

• Hype: Dying down.  It powers so much of the web today it is considered a given
• Value: Real
• Time frame: Now.
• ROI: high for sites requiring sleek interact with any back end data
• Caution: It’s harder than it looks.  Don’t “tack it on” to a site.  Specify your desire to incorporate it into your RFP and listen to what your vendors tell you.

Apollo 13 was supposed to be NASA’s third manned-lunar-landing mission but things didn’t turn out well.  Two days into the mission the spacecraft was crippled by an explosion in oxygen tank #2. Losing oxygen and electrical power rapidly, the crew’s lives depended upon solving a complicated problem rapidly: how do you return to earth when your craft is damaged beyond repair?

The Problem

The Apollo 13 command module’s normal supply of electricity, light, and water were lost, and they were about 200,000 miles from Earth.  They had to invent procedures to:

• Transform the Lunar Module into a command module suitable for carrying not two but three men safely back to earth
• Double the amount of oxygen the Lunar Module was designed to supply from 45 to 90 hours
• Reduce power consumption by 80%
• Reduce water consumption by 80%
• Remove dangerous carbon dioxide now that the normal air scrubbers were damaged
• Create a course back to earth using instruments never designed for such a purpose

The Solution

In a remarkable achievement of teamwork,the Lunar Module was converted from a vessel intended to land on the moon into a “life boat” in space.  Power was transferred from the command module to the lunar module, as was oxygen.  CO2 was removed by the Command Module by attaching canisters using plastic bags, cardboard and tape. Power consumption reduced by literally turning off the heat. Water intake reduced through stoic abstinence.  And a course was recalculated using the sun rather than a suitable navigational star.

A Successful Failure

The final NASA report characterized the accident and resulting course of action  as a “succesful failure.”  Never before had so many men and women collaborated so fast to solve so many problems.  I am not a rocket scientist, but my take away from this chapter in history are:

• Focus on what’s going to work. Ignore the rest.  As NASA Flight Director Eugene Kranz said: “Okay, people! Listen up! I want you all to forget the flight plan! From this moment on we are improvising a new mission…”
• Tap everyone on the team for information. Engineers, fabricators and vendors were all pulled into the problem-solving process
• Use what works.  Apollo 13’s rigged solutions included plastic bags, cardboard, tape and all manners of improvisation.  And it worked.
• Lastly, never, ever lose site of the goal.  For Apollo 13 it was saving lives.  For your business it may be more elusive but just as visceral.

Next Steps

• WATCH: If you have but 2 minutes watch this pivotal problem solving scene on YouTube.  If you have NetFlix, rent Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, a masterpiece of narrative.
• READ:  “Failure is not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond” (available on Amazon).  If you have an Amazon Kindle (wireless book reader) click here to download
• TEACH: Look around your own business.  Ask yourself the question “what could we fix right now with what we have right here?”  It won’t be as scary as the movie, but it can have a lasting impact on your business life.

• Identify the drivers in your business ecosystem.  In the service industry these are often the 4 S’s: Surroundings, Suppliers, Systems, Skills.  If you are in manufacturing, you can start with the 6 M’s: Machine, Method, Materials, Maintenance, Man and Mother Nature
• Take a holistic approach. When you look for the relationships between different areas of your business you can’t help but form a big picture view.
• Think in a structured manner about ideas that were previously hard to pin down.

Sample Diagrams

Resources

• If you love Microsoft Excel, you might want to take a look at BPI Consulting’s SPC for Excel” will jump start your planning process.
• If you’re in more of a brainstorming mood, check out Mindjet’s Mindmanager 7, which runs on both PC’s and Macs.

Think if it like this: if you’ve got an internet connection you’ve got access to storage space and software applications limited only by your budget. Nothing to install and nothing to maintain.

How It Will Affect Your Business

According to Merrill Lynch, it is estimated to be a $100 billion market within three years time.  If true, your business will:

• Own fewer servers
• License software on a monthly, per user basis rather than the more prevalent “per seat” basis
• Store data offsite rather than local harddrives

As Wiggly As Web 2.0

The term “cloud” comes from the term used to describe how various computers connect to one another over the internet. The lack of specificity in the illustration is helpful in understanding that “everything takes place on the internet.”  When it comes to understanding new and emerging business services, the vaguery is frustrating, just like that evil term “Web 2.0″

Examples For Managers In a Hurry

For business managers demanding great specificity, here are some examples to get you started:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) - on demand servers and caching infrastructure favored by start ups. Need more storage, fill out a form and it’s online in minutes.
• Microsoft Live Mesh - which went live today for public beta (just use your hotmail or live.com address to log in) wants to compete with Apple and Google.  Click here for a nice screencam demo of Mesh.com.
• Google - Google and IBM are providing clusters of processors to universities for research programs. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentation while still “in beta” suggest a strategy broader and targeted towards business computing.

Lack of Uptime Guarantees Is A Problem

The problem with all this is the lack of reliability and uptime guarantees. When your critical data is out on the cloud and the cloud fails you’re just out of luck.  As I write this Apple’s “Mobile-Me” has failed to sync my calendar and contacts for 24 hours and Basecamp (a project management site built upon Amazon’s services) died for a critical two hour window when I needed it most.  In both instances I had local backup copies at the read.

Buzzword Status Score

• Hype: High
• Value: Real
• Time frame: Now, now, now!
• Caution: Control freaks will be frustrated

Seeing absolutely no reason to buy the new 3G iPhone - AT&T already takes enough out of my wallet each month, so why pay more each month for nasty customer service  - I am content to enjoy the Apps.  Particularly impressed by Epocrates, which has been available as a Wi-Fi “application” for some time, but the whole offline experience is just great.  Highly recommend it for fellow healthcare folks.

Other top applications tonight have been:

• Remote - when you’re too lazy to get off the sofa to change iTunes yourself
• New York Times - now I can read on the subway while I ignore the Mariachi band next to me
• NetNewsWire - RSS Feeds that sync with my desktops and laptops
• Jott - now that I got the phone version working with Evernote, this should be interesting
• Facebook - now I can communicate with my twin 17-year old nieces who tell me “Uncle Mark, email is so 2006″

As for the rest of the applications, there’s really no way I’m going to pay $29.99 for the Pocket English to Portuguese Translation Dictionary.  I already know the international gesture for “sorry this seat is taken.”